In the final weeks of the school year, LSU Theatre students are still hard at work pulling together the last show of the year. For some of them, it will be their last LSU show ever.
In the Reilly Theatre sits one of the most complicated sets LSU Theatre has ever attempted for the department’s last Main Stage show of the semester, “The Play That Goes Wrong.”
Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, “The Play That Goes Wrong” is a comedy full of wild events and mishaps. The story follows a group of performers as they put on a murder mystery, but things do not go as planned.
Because of the nature of the play, with all the physical comedy and the technical work that needed to be done, it took a large team and a lot of group effort to produce.
Ethan Rodgers is a senior technical theatre major and the designer behind the set. Rodgers started designing the look and functionality of the set all the way back in November.
“It was a long road to finalize what we were going to do before we even started,” Rodgers said.
In the show, set pieces break and fall and things can get dangerous really quickly, so safety was a real concern.
There was an added complication with the venue choice for a show. When it comes to theaters, a stage can come in different shapes and sizes. The most common is the proscenium stage, which creates the illusion of a fourth wall separating the stage and audience. However, the Reilly Theatre is a thrust stage, which means the stage can be seen not just by one side, but three.
“The Play That Goes Wrong” was written for a proscenium, and so Rodgers had to work out a way for an audience to enjoy the show on every side of the stage.
Rodgers said there was a lot of “throwing ideas at the wall and just seeing what sticks. The set is so much part of the energy of the show. It’s kind of like another actor.”
Within the world of LSU technical theater, Rodgers has become the go-to for set designing, and that does not happen naturally. Rodgers said that from the moment he came to LSU, he knew what he wanted to do, and he completely invested in it. He mentioned his luck in LSU’s choice of technical design professors.
“[They are] genuinely fantastic people and fantastic teachers that are super enthusiastic about teaching students,” he said.
Rodgers closed by saying, “This is a really cool, lighthearted opportunity for people to be able to come here and enjoy things. And it also is kind of cool that it’s showing off like the power of LSU’s theater tech department, which I feel like it isn’t super obvious the work that we do.”
Eric Rhode is a senior theatre performance major, and he plays Max Bennett in the show. Rhode described the show’s characters as odd, and maybe a bit clueless. Outside of his new role, Rhode might be best known for playing Tobey Maguire in “I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire.”
Though Rhode is a natural when it comes to comedy, this show was a little bit of a new challenge. Because of all of the events that play out onstage, the cast needed to be off-book before starting rehearsal.
“It was just really cool to see everybody just jump into it, gung ho ready,” Rhode said. “And every single day, they added in new little prop pieces or set pieces to work around that just added a level of randomness and discovery throughout.”
When creating a show, actors come to a rehearsal space every day for hours at a time, working away at shaping characters and a story in hopes that an audience connects to the show. For Eric Rhode, one of the best parts of performing is the audience.
“I’m very excited for the audience to be there because the audience is just an energy machine, and they’re going to find this show hilarious,” he said.
For many people in the cast and crew, this is their last hurrah in LSU Theatre. “The Play that Goes Wrong” stands to be the culmination of their careers at LSU.
“I started thinking about that within the last couple days where this is the last show, and with such a well known show like this, I kind of cannot be more grateful to be a part of it,” Rhode said. “It has shown me again and again and again how much I love this world that is theater and how much I just desire to do it for the rest of my life outside of LSU.”
He said he’s grateful to be a part of this production.
“The very fact that I am being able to put my stamp on it to have people see my interpretation of it — I’m really, really grateful,” Rhode said.
“The Play That Goes Wrong” opens at the Reilly Theatre on April 16. Tickets to the show are available through the PurplePass website.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source lsureveille.com ’
